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Friday, December 18, 2015

This is the first post I’ve done using Open Live Writer (OLW). With the release 0.5.1.2 there is support for Blogger after Google updated their API to use OAuth 2 and thus breaking the functionality in the old Windows Live Writer and the initial release of OLW. The error was: Blogger returned the following error: NotFound: Not Found.

A known issue with this release is that labels/categories can’t be set when posting to Blogger.

Wednesday, December 2, 2015

If you want to save all your layouts to separate drawings our free LayoutsToDwgs.lsp can do the trick. It has just been updated to both solve an issue related to a dialog box showing “Include AutoCAD Map information in the export?” as well as to work fine with the most recent versions of AutoCAD. Direct download of this AutoLISP app is here.

Tuesday, December 1, 2015

SSMPropEditor 6.0 is now available. This Sheet Set Manager Editor can save hours of work if your company uses AutoCAD’s Sheet Set Manager. Use Find and Replace of text among all properties and all sheets or change properties on multiple sheets at the same time. If you want to make changes in Excel, that can be done too. Copy custom properties that are defined in one Sheet Set into another Sheet Set. All you need to speed up your work with the Sheet Set Manager.

Monday, November 30, 2015

AutoCAD 2016 for Mac and AutoCAD LT 2016 for Mac were released November 21, 2015 and here are the news:

Xref path management – You can now map Xref file paths from your Mac to Windows machines, including networked servers, so sharing drawings back-and-forth between project team members is now easier.

Express Tools – We’ve brought over several of the popular Express Tools from Windows to Mac, so you get the efficiency gains from Express Tools on your Mac and experience less friction when switching between platforms.

Features from the Windows version of AutoCAD 2016 – This release includes many of the newest features from the Windows version. You can now use Revision Clouds, DIM Command Enhancements, Command Preview, and Selection Effects on the Mac platform.

Properties Palette – You can now display the Properties you use most often without having to scroll through the entire properties list.

Multi-Lingual User Interface (MUI) – Set your language (French or English) in the Mac System Preferences and AutoCAD will follow. There’s now no need for a separate install.

Update Notification – Updates are now delivered as small packages that don’t require lengthy downloads or install times.

Smaller PDFs with select-and-search capability – PDF output file-size is now greatly reduced, making it easier to share and open. Text in your PDFs is now selectable and searchable.

Pan and Zoom – Navigating your drawings is now easier because we’ve sped up and smoothed out panning and zooming.

TrueType font enhancements – All TrueType font text is retained in the drawing, so panning and zooming performance is considerably improved.

Monday, November 16, 2015

With ACA_db you can use AutoCAD Architecture or AutoCAD MEP even more as part of your BIM process. Property Set values can automatically be updated back and forth to one or many external databases. If you make changes to the Extended Data values within a Property Set they can be synchronized back to the external database. Any Property in a Property Set Definition can be exported and all editable Properties can be imported.

This release adds support for AutoCAD Architecture 2016 or AutoCAD MEP 2016 as well as some bug fixes.

Tuesday, October 13, 2015

JTB Word's DWG Columns for Explorer has been updated. We've fixed an issue with cleaning up column information when uninstalling. It has also been tested with Windows 10.

If you want to see the DWG and DXF properties and metadata in Explorer columns please give the trial a try. No need to have AutoCAD or other CAD programs installed for this to work. After the trial has expired you can still use it to show the DWG version information as long as you like.

Monday, October 12, 2015

A couple of customers of JTB FlexReport reported about an issue with the the usage monitoring of Esri ArcGIS licenses (like ARC/INFO, Grid, Tin, Viewer). The number of issued licenses and the number of licenses in use were 2-5 times higher than what the ArcGIS License Server Administrator showed. We found that it was the FlexNet tool lmutil.exe that caused this problem. lmutil.exe v11.12.1.4 and v11.12.1.2 did not work but v11.11.1.2 and v11.11.1.0 did work. Thus the solution was to take an older version of lmutil.exe and put in the JTB FlexReport folder.

Wednesday, October 7, 2015

If you speak French better than English or just prefer French head over to our reseller RasterTech's new webpage http://www.rastertech.fr/flexreport "JTB FlexReport est une solution économique mais complète pour un suivi des actifs logiciels et des licences, fournissant des statistiques enrichies." JTB FlexReport is not localized to other languages (yet) but our French reseller RasterTech has done product documentation in French and can also provide product support in French.

The following operating systems are officially supported for 32-bit and 64-bit AutoCAD 2016 with Service Pack 1.

Windows 10 Enterprise edition

Windows 10 Professional edition

Problems Reported with the Customer Error Reporting Utility

As a result of the detailed information that we received from customers who used the Customer Error Reporting Utility, we were able to identify and fix a number of problems. Updates were made to the following commands and features:

A high resolution image in a drawing might have an unexpected result when exported as a DWF file in some cases.

A mismatched plot page size results in an error report and halts the print job in some cases.

The default PDF file name discards all characters that follow a period.

In some Truetype fonts, characters with diacritical marks that are underlined in a text object do not plot.

When plotting PDF files, SHX text in PDF comments can be turned off by setting EPDFSHX=0 (the default is 1). In addition, some PDF viewers display text that uses SHX fonts as comments and this system variable addresses this issue as well. In a future release, we plan to rename this system variable to begin with the letters PDF.

Performance

Performance slows down for the OPEN and REGEN commands in drawings that contain many dynamic block with fields.

Friday, August 7, 2015

If you have Windows 10 installed and also have an NVIDIA graphic card you might run into a problem installing KB3074683 where the computer restarts several times and fails to install the "Security Update for Windows 10 for x64-based Systems (KB3074683)".

Have you been trapped in a reboot loop? The update reaches a certain percentage of installation before failing and rolling back.

This might be a solution to the endless reboot cycle. It worked for me.

Run regedit in Windows. Hold down the Windows button on the keyboard and press R and enter regedit and click on OK. (As always with regedit, be careful and if needed make a backup of the registry first)

The following issues are addressed by this Hotfix: - A display issue with the design feed palette, Geographic Location dialog, Help window browser, and Start page for Windows 8.1 operating systems at high DPI settings; - A performance issue with the Publish command; - A plotting issue where text formatted right-to-left plots upside down.

Thursday, June 25, 2015

As you might know JTB World has several of the apps on Autodesk Exchange Apps Store and now this store has reached the 1 million download milestone! This has been posted about on Autodesk’s In the Fold blog.

“We’re celebrating the one-millionth app download on the Autodesk Exchange Apps, a web-based design and engineering app store created for the Autodesk community.”

JTB World is also mentioned: “One person operations such as SoftDraft, LLC, RedTransit Consultants, LLC and JTB World have also participated in Exchange Apps, contributing anywhere from 15-50 apps – with JTB World emerging as an early adopter of new store features like the BlueSnap payment gateway.”

Take a look at our apps here and you might find a productivity favorite among them making your AutoCAD work easier or quicker.

Wednesday, May 27, 2015

Yesterday a problem started with Windows Live Writer and Blogger making it impossible to post blog posts or open published posts on Google's Blogger. I use the latest build of Microsoft's Windows Live Writer 2012. (Build 16.4.3528.331) The first error showing says "Blogger returned the following error: NotFound: Not Found

Then the Sign in dialog box shows and clicking on OK shows the above message again.

Apparently this issue happens with other apps that are using the Blogger API too. Even Word 2016 Preview for Windows is not working with Blogger.

In the meantime a workaround that can be used is to create the post in Windows Live Writer and copy and paste to the Compose mode in Blogger, alternatively and sometimes the best option is to switch to Source in Windows Live Writer, select all, copy and paste to the HTML mode in Blogger. Note that this will not work if you normally upload images through Windows Live Writer. In this case you need to re-insert the images in Blogger. But if you have the images already online it is a decent workaround.

---

Update: Hopefully a solution is coming soon. This is a comment on the Blogger forum:Hi everyone,Thank you all for reporting this issue. The Blogger team is now working to fix it as soon as possible.We will post an update here, once everything is back to normal.Thanks and sorry for any inconvenience caused.Blogger Team---

New update that does not sounds promising: We appreciate you coming here and letting us know about this issue. It looks like this error is a result of an authentication problem between Google and Live Writer. A long time ago, we announced we were deprecating our old authentication system and we encouraged developers to move to the new one (OAuth 2.0). It seems that Live Writer is still using our old system, which is causing the issue. We are currently looking into it, but we suggest that users also reach out to Microsoft to report the issue.

Thanks,

Blogger Suport Team

p.s. please disconsider the previous official announcement.---Latest update from Google:Hello again everyone,We just want to let you know that we are working in partnership with Microsoft to come up with a quick resolution for the issue with Windows Live Writer and Blogger. We will provide you with more information as soon as we have it.Thanks,

Blogger Support Team

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Update June 2: Today it works again to post blogs from Windows Live Writer to Blogger. Thanks Google and Microsoft for working together on this.

Wednesday, May 6, 2015

In JTB FlexReport Config>Features and our freeware JTB FlexReport LT you can use the “Get Feature Descriptions” button to get the descriptions for codes like 86445ACD_2016_0F and more so the feature description is used in reports instead of the feature code.

Spiro is a add-in can be used with AutoCAD to create Spirograph (TM)- like patterns. Turn AutoCAD into an educational toy that will provide hours of fun for the whole family! Spiro creates a hypotrochoid pattern based on the specified outer circle, inner circle and pen distance. A variety of polylines created with the Spiro plugin in AutoCAD and its verticals.

This new version has some bugs fixed and adds support for AutoCAD 2016.

Friday, April 17, 2015

JTB World’s SmartPurger has been updated to support AutoCAD 2016. SmartPurger is a batch and script utility for processing multiple AutoCAD drawings with full control. Execute LSP or SCR files on multiple drawings. SmartPurger handles crashes so the AutoCAD batch processing continues to the end and leaves bad drawings to be corrected manually. Many purge and cleanup settings are available. Useful before backups and distribution of drawings. The file's modified time stamp can be restored. What do you want to automate?

Thursday, April 16, 2015

JTB CAD Automation Tools 4.2 has been released. New in version 4.2 is AutoCAD 2016 support and that AutoUpd can import block and attribute data from drawings.

With the Import from drawings button you can get block and attribute information from one or many drawings.

What is JTB CAD Automation Tools?

Multiple drawings can be automatically created from a typical drawing or updated based on a control file that can be created with an Excel template. Make the changes in Excel and let the program do all the work for you. This is a real time saver if you need to make adjustments on hundreds or thousands of drawings.

Optionally an AutoLISP file (*.lsp;*.vlx;*.fas) can be loaded for each drawing. Each drawing can use a separate AutoLISP file if needed. This gives you almost unlimited flexibility when it comes to what task you want to automate.

Example of usages: Add a stamp block; insert a title block; update text or attributes in the title block; insert text, block or xref; change text or attribute values and more. Change all external references (xrefs) from absolute paths to relative paths for archive purpose. Find and replace attribute or text values.

Bulk updating AutoCAD or BricsCAD drawings in most any way that you would like.

With Text Bubble Plus you can insert text bubbles to lines, curves, or draw leaders with it, or quickly make a schedule from text bubbles and/or other blocks. Incrementing of numbers or letters is done automatically. To learn about all features visit JTB Text Bubble Plus.

JTB Align Plus 3.5 has been released. If you want to align objects quickly in AutoCAD this app is for you. Here are the news:

Added support for AutoCAD® 2016

Fix slide image side-effect bug

Fix bug when working in paper space's viewport

Upgrade error handler functions

Added digital signing of MSI file

The JTB_Align_Any and JTB_Align_Objects commands will copy and align your text, block or selection of objects at picked point of selected line or curve. Curve can be Arc, Circle, Polyline, Leader or 3D Polyline, in current space as well as nested inside Blocks or Xrefs. For more features visit JTB Align Plus.

In previous versions I had used Visual Studio 2010 and now I was using Visual Studio 2013 together with Visual Studio Installer Projects Extension v1.0.0.0. On this post I found the solution in the comments. There were several different ones but the one I found was easiest was this one that requires that you have VS 2010 available.

Monday, March 30, 2015

Access multi-valued fields can be useful but sometimes they can cause problems working with the database. If you eventually would want to move the database to SQL Server you will need to redo certain things so related tables are used instead. This article describes how to solve certain things of this Access-only feature.

The article says: In Office Access 2007 (same with newer versions like Access 2010 and Access 2013), you cannot use an append query that references a table that contains a multivalued field. For example, the following query is not valid:

Wednesday, March 25, 2015

JTB FlexReport 9.0 is now released and available. JTB FlexReport is a solution for monitoring network license usage and software usage in general. With its reports you are in a better position to know the actual usage of often expensive licenses. You will easier predict when and how to handle the need of increases or decreases of your licenses.

JTB FlexReport Core, JTB Process Monitor service and client, and JTB SPLM service and client are updated. JTB FlexReport Chart Service and Client will be updated soon but we wanted to get out what’s ready first.

Here are some of the main news:

DSLS support added including import of historic logs and denials.

The SLM tab is renamed to SLM/RMS and adds improved functionality for Sentinel RMS. AVEVA Licensing System fully supported.

SPLM 2012 support added.

Altium license monitoring support added.

JTB Process Monitor updated to handle idling of processes with detection of usage of an application if mouse movement or keyboard usage is detected for the application or if the CPU usage for the application exceeds a specified level. This way you will get a better picture of how much the applications really are being used as sometimes an application can be running the whole day but only being used an hour or so. If monitoring network licenses both with JTB FlexReport Core and JTB Process Monitor you will now see that they match better, especially if you’re making use of TIMEOUTALL or TIMEOUT on the FlexNet license server.

JTB Process Monitor can now detect if different AutoCAD verticals are running even though they use the same acad.exe by the added title filter. Thus you get a report on AutoCAD 2016 as well as AutoCAD Architecture 2016 separately.

Added automatic reading of user and host names from AVEVA’s ALS XML.

Several improvements and bug fixes related to 12D usage monitoring.

Added support for showing user group information on the HTML report grouped on servers. User groups are first taken from the FlexNet options file if it’s been specified on the FlexNet tab, otherwise from user groups defined in the Group Administrator.

Added support for SLM based licenses to show up in the HTML reports and also log feature usage to the ‘log’ table.

This plug-in allows you to specify a block that will change its display when plotted to indicate whether the drawing had a valid digital signature at the time of plotting.

The DigSigStamp plugin helps you identify visually when drawings have valid digital signatures. You use one of the plugin's commands to specify blocks to display when a drawing has a valid digital signature and when it does not. You then assign a particular block reference - which usually exists in the title block of your drawing - that will change its display to one of these two block definitions depending on the state of the drawing. The application even works when plotting, an operation that typically invalidates a drawing's digital signature.

Available as AutoCAD App (Plug-in) on Autodesk Exchange Apps to purchase or to try.

The following is an example of how the block can look like. The design of them is completely up to you. This drawing has a valid digital certificate.

Friday, March 20, 2015

Sometimes there can be a reason why you want to change the application title in AutoCAD. It can be that you need to take nice screenshots for documentation for example. In my case I could not right now register the new AutoCAD 2016 as it’s just been released an Autodesk is probably not yet ready with the registration part of it. Instead of showing "Autodesk AutoCAD 2016 - UNREGISTERED VERSION" or "Autodesk AutoCAD 2016 - NOT FOR RESALE" you want it to show "Autodesk AutoCAD 2016" or something else. With JTB Change Title this can be done.

There are a few nice news added that you might find useful. Revision Clouds are easier to create and modify. Using the REVCLOUD command the new Modify options makes it possible to draw new revision cloud segments as well as erase selected portions of existing revision clouds.

I will keep updating the AutoCAD 2016 page with more about this new version as well as make some blog posts about specific new or updated features.

Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Here’s a support email we got from a JTB FlexReport customer that can be useful for others that might run into this problem and want a solution to it.

We updated the ANSYS-License manager last month to the latest version, included in ANSYS 16.0. The latest ANSYS-License manager uses lmgrd.exe 11.12.1.1 and lmutil.exe 11.12.1.1

After this update, JTB FlexReport didn’t show data about ANSYS licenses.

After updating lmutil.exe from 11.11.1.0 to 11.12.1.0 in the JTB FlexReport folder everything works fine.

In the next upcoming JTB FlexReport version lmutil.exe version 11.12.1.4 will be included to make license usage reporting work for both ANSYS 16.0 as well as upcoming Autodesk 2016 products. In the meantime if needed you can manually copy over the lmutil.exe file.

Tuesday, March 17, 2015

JTB Current Folder version 1.2 for AutoCAD has been released by JTB World. Speed up navigation among your drawings and files you want to open, attach or insert with the dynamic shortcut to the current drawings folder within the places area in AutoCAD’s file selection dialog boxes.

Wednesday, March 11, 2015

JTB Steel for AutoCAD is an Add-in running inside AutoCAD, adding powerful command features to help you draw simple and complex steelwork frames and details efficiently.

You can select and insert Steel Sections from JTB Steel library to AutoCAD® drawing just as inserting blocks. You can draw Steel Frames just as drawing lines by 2 pickpoints. All created drawing objects are either blocks or dynamic blocks. Once Steel members are inserted, you can edit these using powerful editing commands located on Tools Palette.

JTB Steel includes advanced automation techniques for modifying dynamic blocks. This means that you can easily manage your drawings and quickly finalize your details. The below example was fully created using JTB Steel (this includes any alignment, rotation etc):

Monday, March 2, 2015

Autodesk is preparing for their 2016 products like AutoCAD 2016 and Revit 2016.

“Autodesk 2016 products can obtain license from Network License Server – v11.12 and above. However, it is strongly recommended to upgrade the license servers to the latest version – v11.12.1.4 – when using 2016 products.”

Downloads for latest version is available here. And specifically for v11.12.1.4 here:

adskflex.exe, lmgrd.exe, lmutil.exe and lmtools.exe are all version 11.12.1.4 now.

JTB World’s JTB FlexReport license monitoring tool has been tested with and supports this new version and is prepared to be able to get statistics of license usage and report on it for all Autodesk 2016 products.

Friday, February 13, 2015

Have you ever been frustrated over the many steps you need to take to navigate to the same folder as where your current drawing is, in AutoCAD’s file selection dialog boxes? No need anymore.

When JTB Current Folder is installed, every time you open a drawing, or attach external references, insert drawing as block or create a block, you will have a Current Folder item on the left of your file selection dialog box (in the custom places area). The Current Folder will bring your active drawing's path just 1 click away, which otherwise is often several clicks away.

Tuesday, February 10, 2015

As you can see in the post on Google Maps blog, Google Earth Pro is now free. “Google Earth Pro has all the easy-to-use features and detailed imagery of Google Earth, along with advanced tools that help you measure 3D buildings, print high-resolution images for presentations or reports, and record HD movies of your virtual flights around the world.”

Wednesday, February 4, 2015

JTB Text Bubble Plus 1.6 for has been AutoCAD released. If you work with different kind of text bubbles that has numbers or letters that you want to automatically increment, JTB Text Bubble Plus can be a great productivity help.

Based on user requests, here’s the news in version 1.6:

TBBRE now have option to renumber with/without grouping similar numbers.

Now the increment functionality covers a wider range of pattern. If you enter 1a, 1b then it will go 1c, 1d ... If you enter AB1, AB2 then it will go AB3, AB4 ...

Bug fixed when DimScale is set to 0.

The basic Text Bubble app has also be updated with these news.

You can read more about JTB Text Bubble Plus or purchase it from our product page.

Friday, January 30, 2015

“Jimmy Bergmark of JTB World has decades of experience in the AutoCAD industry. That’s why he started his own business to help fellow CAD users. He agreed to share his experience in that industry with readers in this interview.” Read the rest here.